Andrew Cookson

Biography

I read engineering at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and upon graduation spent some time as a naval architect. This was followed by a PhD at the Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London, with Professors S. Sherwin and D. Doorly. My doctoral thesis was a computational investigation of helical pipe geometries from a mixing perspective, with potential application to artery bypass grafts and arterio-venous shunts. Upon completion I commenced post-doctoral research into cardiac perfusion imaging with Prof. N. Smith at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, before moving to the Department of Biomedical Engineering, King’s College London to continue this project.

Scientific Research

The central scientific project with which I am involved is to develop a mathematical & computational model of cardiac perfusion. This model is then used as a basis from which to model MRI cardiac perfusion imaging.

In addition, through interactions with other CHeart developers, I have developed some interest in electro-physiology modelling and estimation of pressure fields from MRI velocity measurements (PPE).

CHeart Development

The majority of my involvement in CHeart has been to enable the scientific research into cardiac perfusion. This has required the development of CHeart modules for solving scalar transport equations, generic coupling operators, projection routines and Petrov-Galerkin stabilisation. I have also implemented more general functionality such as parsing of mathematical expressions from text, which greatly enables user-specification of new coupled problems, without requiring any additional code.